Holy Redirects

[Nobody1533077082756]

Currently working on a project for a medium sized site (http://sleeponcall.com/) but the SEOMoz crawl crawled over 14,000 pages because the report is showing more than 8,000 redirects.

The client has no clue how this happened as their previous web programmers may not have been on the ball.

What could be causing the problem and what is the best way to untangle this mess?

[JustinTaylor88]

My guess would be that at some point the url structure of the site has been changed and have 301'd from the old url structure to the new one.

Have you checked the .htaccess file on the server to see if there are any redirect code in there?

Another possibility is the platform could be causing it. What platform is the site created in? If it is an off the shelf e-com system then configs can cause these kind of issues, I believe magento is a culprit of this if its not set up correctly.

[AndreVanKets]

Its sounds like pages are on a redirect loop....

Run a scrawl using link sleuth and identify the URL's that are redirecting and you can take it from there.

Perhaps do the scan, and then report back with an example of why they are redirecting and we can be of better assistance.

Greg

[ChristopherM]

Hi Carl,

I immediately fired up Xenu and did a test, there's an option to set redirects as errors, to locate the redirects. Here's is the downloadable export: http://www.imoddigital.com/sleeponcall/sleeponcall.xlsx

When you look at the file in Excel, the redirect pages won't appear as 200, they'll either be 301 or 302, this will allow you to isolate the troublesome pages.

Please do check your .htaccess file like Justin has suggested, that would have been my very first point of call.

Hope that helps!

Christopher

[Nobody1533077082756]

Thanks for the help, the site is in fact run on Magento.

I'll have the programmer check the redirect code in the .htacess file, is there anything specific I should be looking for in the Magento setup?

[William.Lau]

Look for the numbers 301,302 redirects.

i.e. [r=301,nc] and something along those lines. Look for the culprit that way and remove it.

I thought Magento was up to date on these problems, are you running the latest? I find it odd that everything is within the sub /index.php/'category'.

[Nobody1533077082756]

I agree the way the entire site is setup is strange. Still trying to get answers from the original site builders as to what they did and why.

[William.Lau]

If you have the resources I suggest rebuilding it under Magento again. Might be well worth the time if you have a lot of problems with the previous design.

[ChristopherM]

Did you have a look at the file I made for you? Hope so, took me 20 minutes to compile and all

As William said, look for 301 or 302 mentioned in the .htaccess file, if those are mentioned there, that's a sign that things are being redirected.

A rebuild is always useful, but of course, the budget probably isn't there and I can respect that.

Let us know about the .htaccess file..

[JustinTaylor88]

Carl

If you check through Everett Sizemore's pro webinar about E-comerce SEO, he covers the correct way to set up of Megneto for ecommerce, from memory he also offers some additional resources you can check out. i think its around 45 mins in.

http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/ecommerce-seo-fix-and-avoid-common-issues

Hope that helps